﻿The nondiscrimination ordinances currently being debated in Billings and Bozeman bring up issues of fairness, safety, and how we understand sex and gender as altogether separate items. Indeed, what we learned in sex education class was cursory at best, and at worst, plain wrong.

I am co-founder of a nonprofit based in Missoula called The Interface Project. The Interface Project features stories of people around the world living with intersex traits - or variations of sex anatomy - under the banner: No Body Is Shameful.® Individuals born with such differences (myself included) present powerful portraits of resilience, visibility, and authentic lived experience. The focus is on dignity and self-determination: values we know Montanans hold dear.

This article was one of the first to debunk the myth of “vagina = female, penis = male” and concludes that bodies (especially genitals) have always varied widely in appearance and function. What is widely known, but rarely discussed is:

There are as many ways to express one’s gender as there are people in the world,

bodies do not fit neatly into the two molds we learned about as children, and

our genitals, chromosomes, and hormones often have nothing to do with how we express our gender, live our life, or choose our partner.

“My sense is that we may not need the language of innateness or genetics to understand that we are all ethically bound to recognize another person’s declared or enacted sense of sex and/or gender. We do not have to agree upon the “origins” of that sense of self to agree that it is ethically obligatory to support and recognize sexed and gendered modes of being that are crucial to a person’s well-being.”

﻿... Or as another decorated biologist put it: “Nature loves variety. Unfortunately, society hates it.” I believe differently bodied people and differently gendered people will require protection and thoughtful consideration as long as society's rigidity continues to clash with nature’s resolve.